CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Where to start with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort? Begin with director Jacques Demy’s technical brilliance: the opening minutes are eye-popping, and even feature a transporter bridge. Teesiders, take note. La La Land's beginning is nifty, but Demy got there first. Then watch the camera swoop up from the main square after the “Arrivée des camionneurs”, straight through an open window and into the ballet studio run by the Garnier sisters. Demy features Rochefort as an uncredited extra, production designer Bernard Evein even repainting much of the town centre. The streets and shutters Read more ...
Asya Draganova
Do you remember Jack Peñate? His name may have been forgotten by some, or not heard yet by others. But his new album After You, following from Matinée (2007) and Everything is New (2009), is worth the listen for the fans of smart, intricate pop music that is true to the independent vibe. Jack has very audibly moved away from his original playful, naïve indie rock sound which led to his early success, to pursue a much more mature take on making music. But will his original audience follow?Well, they might, and Peñate is likely to gain some new listeners too, because After You is a clear Read more ...
Graham Fuller
John Huston’s film of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a conundrum.Despite below-par blue screen work, it’s a fantastic achievement in terms of re-creating the unequal combat of Captain Ahab's Crew vs. Great White Sperm Whale, especially the three-day chase with which the author, anticipating The French Connection and Jaws, brought his literary behemoth to a climax. Did they really not have CGI in 1956?Gregory Peck’s Ahab is much better than the star himself thought: it has a Shakespearian resonance that suggests Peck wasn’t going to be outdone by Orson Welles (whose Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Composer, classical guitarist and ensemble leader Simon Thacker has spent the past decade immersed in distinct musical cultures; from the reinterpretations and reimaginings of the musical traditions of eastern Europe and the Roma people that underpin his Songs of the Roma trio, to his collaborative work with musicians from across the Indian subcontinent under the ever-expanding Svara-Kanti name. Simon Thacker’s Ritmata is a back-to-basics of sorts: the first album from Thacker’s original musical ensemble, Táradh is a collection of mostly original compositions which draw inspiration from Read more ...
mark.kidel
Israel isn’t generally kind to the Jews who have come from somewhere other than eastern Europe and Russia. Music has provided one of the avenues through which this despised and often culturally Arab minority has been able to make itself recognised.El Khat is a band led by an Israeli of Yemeni origin, the astonishingly inventive composer and musician Eyal El Wahab. Their first album, Saadia Jefferson is typical of a new wave of dis-placed music, with a DNA that draws from ancestral roots – in this case the music of Yemen, but with a world-attuned sensibility that references David Bowie, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
For all they've inspired swathes of the most crushingly mundane music of the modern age from Sheeran on down, Coldplay have always been at their best at their most grandiose. That is, when they shake off Chris Martin's I'm-a-normal-bloke schtick and let their romanticism – in melodies, arrangements and fairytale lyrics – fly free. So it sounded promising when it emerged they were releasing a double album full of global influences: maybe they're really going to go for it this time?In the event, at 53 minutes, Everyday Life is actually shorter than some of their single albums. And for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
That voice’s husky confiding wasn’t quite silenced. Working helped Leonard Cohen live a little longer, and old friends and family have gathered to complete these last bequests. “As for the fall it began long ago,” he sings, and more than a quarter of his rare, honed albums have now been released in the miraculous final arc since his financial theft-enforced, septuagenarian comeback in 2008.Cohen’s son Adam continues his co-production from 2016’s seeming swansong You Want It Darker, and with Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, Javier Mas and Anjani Thomas among the other returning compadres, has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a dogged determination to see every task through, whether he’s doing the shopping for his household or supporting a collapsing palace by its beams. When the Golem bares his teeth, he’s terrifying – though the 1920 German film’s cultural resonance is the eeriest thing about it.Written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen (who also scripted FW Murnau's Read more ...
Owen Richards
Beck stands on the front cover of his new album Hyperspace with a vintage Toyota and Japanese text resplendent above. It’s the perfect scene setter for an album you could easily imagine soundtracking a midnight drive through Tokyo. Or if the lyrics are anything to go by, an intergalactic voyage. Following on from 2017’s excellent Colours, Beck has settled into a reliable late-career groove that mixes deceptively simple songwriting with intricate production. The best example of this is the aptly-named “Chemical”, creating sounds that wash over your synapses like a psychoactive compound. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The contemporary context of the Netherlands’s Iguana Death Cult is clear. Their blues-edged garage rock exists in a continuum encompassing Amyl and The Sniffers, The Chats, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Oh Sees. Nude Casino is more measured than the first and second bands, less eclectic than the third and fourth but nonetheless is in tune with a pancontinental reductiveness where the bracing live experience – and relentless touring – is seemingly more important than finessing what’s caught on tape.Nude Casino, their second album, is hobbled by a flat, one-size-fits-all production Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lady Antebellum have stayed in the mainstream country world Taylor Swift forded to full pop stardom. Beginning alongside her on Nashville’s aptly named Big Machine label, they’ve kept the genre’s knack for narrative, emotion and residual hints of authenticity alongside imposing chart power. As slide guitar, fiddle and harmonica symbolically curl around big, slick choruses, they aren’t so far from the “big hat” music which made Garth Brooks oddly parallel gangsta-rap as the sound of America at the dawn of the Nineties. Lady Antebellum offer more 21st century, feminised sensitivity, alluding to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Of 2019’s pop culture phenomena, the critical reappraisal of Céline Dion as an international treasure is one of the most delightful. It’s been six years since the Quebecois singer last released an English language album, a period in which she closed out 16 years of Las Vegas residencies, soundtracked both Disney and Deadpool and, most importantly, mourned her husband, René and brother, Daniel. Those losses unsurprisingly colour much of Courage, which across an expansive track listing features plenty of moments of recovery and resilience. And even, tentatively, hints at new happiness.Opening Read more ...